Polysulfide polymers are known in the art. The production of polysulfide polymers is characterized by Fettes and Jorczak, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, November 1950, on pages 2,217–2,223. The commercial use of polysulfide polymers in the manufacture of sealants for aerospace applications has long been known and commercially used. Polysulfide sealants have been used to seal aircraft exterior fuselage because of the high tensile strength, high tear strength, thermal resistance and resistance to high ultraviolet light. Polysulfide sealants have been used to seal aircraft fuel tanks because of the resistance to fuel and adhesion upon exposure to fuel.
Polysulfide sealants are generally applied by extrusion using a caulking gun. Such a process may be efficient for permanent panels installed on the aircraft fuselage. However, extruding a sealant to seal apertures in the fuselage of an aircraft such as those associated with access doors can require a significant amount of additional effort than for extruding the same sealant to permanent panels. To extrude a sealant, the interior perimeter of the access door opening is masked and the exterior perimeter of the access door is coated with a release agent prior to extruding the sealant to the masked area of the access door opening to avoid sealing an access door shut. The access door is put in place and clamped down to force the excess sealant around the access door. The sealant is allowed to cure and the excess sealant is trimmed away. This process is time intensive and can add significant labor to servicing aircraft with many access doors. Some aircraft can have as many as a hundred or more access doors that are used to cover sensitive equipment or fittings that must be periodically accessed.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method for sealing access doors, for example those in the fuselage of an aircraft, that does not require masking, reduces trimming and/or is not as labor and time intensive as the conventional extrusion method for sealing the access doors.